Your Example Dell PC doesn't "need your leftover keyboard, mouse, and monitor", because Dell is happy to sell you new ones if you'd rather not supply your own.

Mac Mini is the same.

Very interesting!!! I want to watch this as a movie!

Do you often use VeraCrypt on a company-managed device? I'm sure if you do then it's with the knowledge and consent of your IT department and they'll be responsible for managing any consequences of the VeraCrypt issue according to their official policy as well.

Current base price for a Mac Mini is $599. So, there's that.

If that's a barrier to entry, it's one that is shared by 90% of the (non-laptop) PC market, and it never seemed to bother PC users. It's not like Apple won't happily sell you a keyboard, mouse, and monitor along with your Mac Mini, if that's what you want to do.

There was a time when the people who complained about soldered RAM (and I was one of those people) were a significant enough proportion of the community that manufacturers would pay attention. This was the age when gaming PCs were constructed from high end pieces from the wild-assed cases to the heavy duty PSUs to overclocked CPUs and next gen GPUs.

But overall, that segment of the consumer market has dwindled. Most folks just want to charge their new machine up, connect it to their WiFi network and get going. On the corporate end of things, save for pretty niche areas like engineering and R&D, a cube you can plug a keyboard, mouse and camera into and will last through a few upgrade cycles before it's sold back to a refurb outfit is all that is needed. Nobody in IT departments is pulling RAM chips anymore, particularly at RAM prices right now! Even the folks writing operating systems are starting to get it, and have rediscovered the glory of native apps that don't required bloated Javascript engines just to select a few radio buttons.

Yes, Windows 11 is really that bad. It's cluttered, slow, inconsistent. I've seen it on pretty high end hardware, and it's a dog. And that's before we even talk about how they tried to insert Copilot into everything. It's a shitty version of Windows and even Redmond acknowledges it. It was the impending EOL of Windows 10 that lead me to buy an M1 MacBook Pro, and I've never looked back. If I want to run Linux, I've got servers set up to do that kind of heavy lifting, but I have absolutely no need for whatever it is MS is trying to sell me these days.

Comparable to, say, a 787 airliner, whose environmental damage we tolerate without thought or comment simply because we're already used to it.

Consider the alternative, then. Anthropic does nothing, and sooner or later OpenAI or some other less responsible company delivers an AI with similar capabilities, but just throws it out to the public without much thought about the consequences. Both the black hats and the white hats start using it, of course, but the black hats have a field day compromising anything and everything before the white hats have a chance to find, fix, and distribute all the necessary patches to defend against all the newfound exploits. Not a great situation to be in, but probably unavoidable at this point unless the white hats are given a head start.

Yup, you're not wrong. But that's kind of the point. The one person I know who uses the feature values horizontal screen space enough that they keep it small.

The one person I know who uses vertical tabs can't tell which one is which because the labels cut off too soon. He prefers it but every time I'm at his desk helping with something it's always "oh, nope, not that one..." hunting to switch between things.

I must stress that Joi Ito lost his job at MIT because he received by Bill Gates money from Epstein for his media lab. Also Richard Stallman lost his office there because a student campaigner took offense in his defense arguments of diseased colleague Marvin Minsky as a visitor of Epstein's island.

Under these circumstance I think it is appropriate not to name any academic institution after Bill Gates.

Apart from that I recall his companies treatment of Guido Sohne incident and his support for right wing extremist networks in Europe.

Itâ(TM)s not a âoefreeâ country though. There are limits on everything. One person owns a thing and you canâ(TM)t touch it without permission.

We might have a lot of choices, within a confined area like what shampoo to buy from three different holding companies that might mean itâ(TM)s actually two. But we canâ(TM)t just take that shampoo without buying it.

We also have a duty to society; or we can watch it fall apart, which is what we are doing.

The prediction market is gambling, and thereâ(TM)s no protection at all against rigging. For instance; someone bet a good deal of money that Trump would bless Allah on Easter Sunday. What are the chances they had access to the script going to the teleprompter? Weâ(TM)ve actually had military strikes and peace deals predicted.

Somehow, they made something worse than gambling in a casino and gladiators spectacles and we can bet on life and death now.

And itâ(TM)s like decriminalizing dangerous drugs. It can make things better but only if itâ(TM)s not commercialized and easily accessible. If there are support systems to help with addiction. If there is opportunity for people to live happy lives.

When there is no hope, addiction gets worse. And thereâ(TM)s nothing better to improve profits and numbers of butts in pews than a crumbling hopeless society.

We can incrementally improve but easy access online gambling that favors inside information is the wrong direction. Iâ(TM)d rather trade this freedom for free college education.

Still, Slashdot doesn't have to play along with their weasel wording. For example, "ergonomic collars that deliver an electric pulse" - just say "shock collar". Don't help them whitewash what they're talking about.

Haha, no. Humans' collars are already here, we just keep them in our pockets and pay for them ourselves.

I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a company that doesn't hide things. The difference between Anthropic and (insert company here) is only that Anthropic leaked their source code, so now we can see what they kept hidden.